This is nice. And just in time for the holiday season. Meet U.S. Representative Martha Roby, a.k.a. Cruella DeVille. While the Tea Partying 37-year-old is not fighting tooth and nail against people getting affordable healthcare, she’s coming up with ways to deprive employees and workers of their hard-won rights and protections.

This week she introduced a resolution euphemistically called “Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013,″ which would end the requirement of the Fair Labor Standards Act for employers to pay Time-and-a-Half to employees for every hour worked over 40 in one week. It’s called H.R. 1406, and here’s what the Congressional Budget Office has to say about it:

“H.R. 1406 would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to provide compensatory time for employees in the private sector. In lieu of overtime pay, employees could receive compensatory time off at a rate not less than one and one-half hours for each hour of employment for which overtime pay would otherwise have been required. Such compensatory time could be provided only in accordance with a collective bargaining agreement or with the consent of affected employees. The changes would be effective for five years after enactment of the bill.”

So, this bill is just so many different types of buckets of puke, it's hard to figure out which to dump into the contractor bag first.

For starters, let's be clear, this bill would basically repeal the portion of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which mandates that you get time-and-a-half pay for overtime. Representative Roby, if ever those beady little snake-eyes of yours were ever to glance across these humble lines, I just want you to know, that you have left me dumbfounded, speechless as it were. I mean, I just to I have to admit it here: I am awe-struck by what a horrible, horrible person you are. You have authored a bill that removes a 75-year precedent, and even more importantly, would literally give corporate managers the ability to screw over their employees even more. I salute you for displaying to me new depths of sheer ill-will and malice.

But wait, this pit ain't deep enough for ya?

Why don't you throw in some classic Rovian doublespeak gobbledygook? It's been a good couple of news cycles since the GOoPers opened up that playbook. Could you give the bill a wonderfully innocuous sounding name that makes it seem like it does the opposite of what it actually does? Oh wait, YOU ALREADY DID! The "Working Families Flexibility Act." So now working families have the . . . . ya know . . ."flexibility" or whatever . . . to not get overtime pay. So that's neat.

Now let's be clear, Representative Roby, most people outside of your sleepy little Prozac outhouse of a town, have never heard of you. But this? This just may be your moment to enter the hallowed halls of lexicon. Dare we call naming bills after the opposite of what they actually do Robyan irony? It's a question for posterity, but bream big, you creepy, snake-like creature, and you may just have a type of irony named after you!

Ms. Roby has already wowed me with sheer malice, and potentially entered history's dictionary, which are no small feats. But even these don't hold a candle to the coup de grace.

You know, as a teacher, I don't really get much "overtime pay," as it were. So I could be wrong on this. But I thought the UPSIDE on overtime - from a worker's perspective - was that if you WERE able to put in some extra time, you would get paid a hefty amount more - "time-and-a-half." Now that Rep. Roby, with her welded-on face and robotic smile have done away with that requirement, and made things nice and "flexible," she has gone a step further, and flexibly upended the entire CONCEPT of overtime.

Here's how it works right? So you put in 55 hours one week at work. And no, you're not going to get time-and-a-half. That's gone now. Frowny Face! :-(>

But you can turn that frown upside-down, because your time-and-a-half MONEY been replaced by something super-double-plus JUST AS GOOD, which is "time-OFF-and-a-half." Of course, a great majority of American workers do not enjoy paid time off. So that extra 15 hours that was accrued last week? You'll just be staying home for 15 hours next week and not getting paid for that. But don't worry, we'll only dock you ten hours next week, instead of fifteen.

Speaking as someone familiar with Rovian New World order doublespeak, I'd say that sounds highly double-plus flexi-tastical to me, Representative Roby! My working family's bank account will be so much more flexible without that extra money in it. Robyan irony has worked for me.

Unfortunately for Rep. Roby, and fortunately for everyone else in America, this skunk of a bill wouldn't pass the smell test in the U.S. Senate. But then who knows what the future will bring? After all, we live in interesting times. Bills that would have been politically unthinkable just a few years back are now finding their way on to the House floor, thanks to the Tea Party radicals from the extremist right wing. Maybe someday we can ALL enjoy the "flexibility" of not getting paid time-and-a-half for overtime work!

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